Imran Ahmad Khan, the Conservative MP for Wakefield, has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy after giving him alcohol at a party in 2008.
Khan, whose brother Karim is a prosecutor at the international criminal court in The Hague, was found guilty by a jury at Southwark Crown Court. Although he made no comment as he left court, a member of his legal team said he would be appealing.
The victim, who has not been named, said his allegations were not “taken very seriously” when he first brought them to the Conservative party press office in December 2019.
“I explained this and said: ‘He sexually assaulted me when I was a child, when I was 15,’” the victim said. The complainant said the woman he spoke to sounded “shocked” and passed him on to someone else who asked if he had any “proof” of the allegations. “I said ‘Yes, there’s a police report’, and she said, ‘Well …’, and that was it. I said, ‘I’m going to the police’, and she said, ‘Well, you do that.’”
A Conservative party HQ spokesperson said: “We have found no record of this complaint.”
Several days after the allegations were brought to the party press office, the Conservatives won a huge Commons majority, stripping seats from the ‘red wall’ that were once considered Labour strongholds in northern England and the Midlands. Khan played a significant role in that, becoming Wakefield’s first Conservative MP since 1932. Soon after the election, the victim brought his allegations to police.
The victim told the court that Khan had given him gin and tonics at a house in Staffordshire before taking the boy upstairs and assaulting him.
Police were called to the house and the boy reported the incident, telling officers Khan had asked him to “show me some porn”. The boy decided not to take the allegations further, but he went back to police when he found out Khan was standing as an MP in the 2019 election.
Khan unsuccessfully tried to ban press from reporting on case, saying that because he was an Ahmadi Muslim, for whom alcohol and homosexuality are prohibited, that if the case were made public it would be “a risk to his safety both here and abroad”.
Khan was also accused of further assaults by two other men who gave corroborating evidence during the trial. The first was from the boy’s older brother, who alleges that during the same party, Khan lifted up his kilt—traditionally worn without underwear—to see if he was a “true Scotsman”.
A third man alleges that he was sexually assaulted in his sleep by Khan after smoking cannabis and drinking whisky at a party in Pakistan. He told jurors that the pair had been sharing a room in a guesthouse in Peshawar in west Pakistan when Khan offered him a sleeping pill. He woke up in the middle of the night to find his underwear had been pulled down and Khan was performing a sex act on him: “I pushed him off and told him to stop and said something along the lines of, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’”
Khan was originally suspended from the Conservative party in June 2021 after he was charged with sexual assault. He has been sitting as an independent ever since. On Monday evening the Conservatives announced he had been expelled from the party. Labour have demanded that Khan immediately resign his seat and trigger a byelection in his Wakefield constituency in West Yorkshire.
The judge, Mr. Justice Baker, said Khan would be sentenced at a later date. If Khan’s sentence exceeds 12 months, he will automatically be disqualified from being an MP, which would then trigger the byelection.
